Not a bad place to stop for a coffee meeting. Good weather for mid-winter, too.
Kerry O’Brien’s powerful Logies speech 2019 - YouTube
NetNewsWire is such a great app. Fast, responsive and nice to look at. Syncing with Inoreader can’t come fast enough. @brentsimmons
This is the first time I have ever put a sticker on one of my devices. @burk
James Shelley on Busyness
I have both written about and noted upon the false value of busyness within our societal norms.
One of my favourite independent writers, James Shelley has published an interesting take on the same topic. He cites many references, including one of my favourites, Thorstein Veblen, he of the famous Veblen Goods economic paradox.
James puts a focus on busyness as status symbol:
we need to appear busy because we all know that valuable people are busy people. When we tell others that we are working all the time we are ‘implicitly suggesting that we are sought after, which enhances our perceived status.’
So claiming to ‘be busy’ is virtue signalling our perceived value to the world. It has little to do with the actual work, but the importance of the person to whom the work is attached.
In my articles, I determined that busyness is not a badge of honour, but should be seen as a cry for help. James arrives at a similar conclusion. He explains that busyness should be perceived as one being overcommitted, unclear or unable to prioritise and eliminate.
The alternative to being busy is having clear priorities about what constitutes the highest value, triaged within strict parameters, and then defiantly walking away from everything else that falls below the threshold.
This is not something to be celebrated, so let’s not. We need to find a new definition of personal value. James has a good idea for this, but I’m not going to spoil the surprise. Go read his article and find out what he suggests!
Big thanks to Jason @burk for sending micro.blog shwag all the way to Australia.
Thanks to David’s help at @blot I now have a cool tags view of my posts on that site.
A new look, logo, and website for Fastmail
Today, we launched a refreshed look for Fastmail, with a new logo, app icon, colors, and website.
I like the new typeface. The envelope keeps reminding me of a crown though, which is weird.
Micro.blog successfully imported my Instagram archive. This site is fast becoming my life stream. I’m owning my content.
Nobody Wants to Buy Vocus
Vocus’ share performance over 3 years
Poor Vocus, it must be in bad shape.
From Bill Bennett:
Last week Australian energy company AGL withdrew its A$3 billion takeover offer for Vocus. This came only two weeks after Swedish private equity firm EQT halted its $3.3 billion transaction.
Bill goes on to reflect that as currently structured, Australia’s broadband market may not enable companies to make a reasonable profit:
All of which says bad things about the state of retail telecommunications. The private equity investors have looked and seen there is no quick path to profit.
More patient, longer-term investors like AGL, who have access to the magic formula of adding power sales to a broadband subscription don’t think it looks viable either.
The Australian telecommunications industry reminds me of how our aviation industry was in the 1980s and 1990s. Carriers would arrive, make losses, destroy shareholder value, and disappear. Now, instead of aeroplanes, it’s communication networks.
Same as it ever was.
I’m experiencing the existential crisis that is all too familiar to many a blogger… what goes on this blog of mine and what goes on the other blog of mine? 🤔
Atlassian declares 'The M&A process is broken'
Atlassian is an interesting company that possibly doesn’t get the kudos it might deserve. As an Australian, I have admiration for seeing one of ours hit it big internationally. Atlassian and Canva are probably the only two Australian companies that immediately spring to mind as having won big in the international IT space.
I’m impressed that Atlassian continue to walk the walk in regard to their world-view and values. This is evident in their now public approach to mergers and acquisitions. They are trying to reduce the angst and power imbalance and increase the fairness and focus on outcomes.
From their blog post announcing the release of a new public term sheet to support merger and acquisition deals:
one thing has become very clear to us about the M&A process – it’s outdated, inefficient, and unnecessarily combative, with too much time and energy spent negotiating deal terms and not enough on what matters most: building great products together and delivering more customer value.
There is plenty of ego in the IT world. The ‘bro’ culture permeates, and it promotes ego and ‘winning’, rather than value creation and shared successes.
In an effort to reduce this unnecessary friction and increase trust, we’re doing something that, to our knowledge, no company has done before: we’ve crafted a new M&A term sheet and we’re making it public.
So much time is wasted through replicated effort. The software world is built on the reuse of frameworks. Not having to re-invent the wheel each time a new project begins is how great advancements are realised. What Atlassian are doing here is providing a fundamental public framework for mergers and acquisitions. Spend less time, money and effort doing things that have been done before and instead focus on getting the deal done and realising the value that prompted the M&A in the first place.
The reality is that because of the leverage that many buyers exert over sellers, certain “market” terms have evolved to buyers’ advantage, even though, based on the data, it’s simply not necessary.
Another example where pure laissez-faire markets are wonderful in theory and damaging in reality. Market power is a thing that is readily exerted. This creates a culture of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ where the real focus should be on having the reason for coming together create a win for all. This doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game.
I hope this new approach to M&As catches on, and less money is spent on wasteful lawyer fees and negotiation and everybody can end up with a better outcome at the end of the process. The market will be better off, customers will benefit, and the stakeholders to the deal will both be better off with less of the angst, stress and ill-feeling that can arise at the end of a protracted M&A process.
Thanks for your kind words, micro.bloggers. On a day when our dear pet left us, it’s nice to have positive responses. So different - and so much better - than the snark I might expect on other networks. I love this place.
Today we said goodbye to our gorgeous Airedale Terrier, Indi. Loyal friend for 14 years. She will be missed.
I’ve decided that I’m not going to renew my Lightroom subscription when it comes due. I’ve just gone through and brought all the photos that were on the Adobe Cloud back to my local NAS. I just don’t do enough photography anymore to justify the expense.
He’s almost over the flu now.
OpenDNS & Dynamic IPs
I have changed my DNS provider to OpenDNS. I have been using CloudFlare DNS and have nothing but praise for its speed and stability. However, with kids in the house, I need the additional network filtering and site-blocking that OpenDNS can deliver.
For OpenDNS to work it needs to be kept abreast of my home’s IP address. My ISP doesn’t provide1 a static IP. While my dynamic IP doesn’t change often, any change that does occur prevents the OpenDNS filtering from working. What’s more, it’s a non-visible problem. There are no error messages that pop up alerting of a problem. The filtering just stops working.
OpenDNS know this. They offer an app that runs in the background to monitor and update the OpenDNS service with the current dynamic IP address. However, that app isn’t nice. What’s more, I don’t like the idea of the network filtering being dependent on a laptop device that might not always be available on the network to perform the update.
Enter Raspberry Pi
I have a Raspberry Pi that provides ad-blocking throughout my home network with the brilliant Pi-Hole. Given it’s already important role in my network configuration, I decided the Pi should also be responsible for monitoring any changes to my dynamic IP address.
A bit of research led me to discover that ddclient was the tool for the job. It’s not installed by default on the Pi, but can be installed through the GUI package manager or on the terminal with:
sudo apt-get install ddclient
Once installed, I progressed to follow this solid step-by-step guide on how to configure ddclient with OpenDNS.
Success
The end result is that I now have ddclient running as a daemon process on the Raspberry Pi. It launches upon reboot and checks my IP address every 1 hour.
The best part is that I don’t have to run the very ordinary OpenDNS Updater app on my Mac.
That is, I’m too cheap to pay for.↩︎
Well, this is a good reason to completely leave Google. It’s not sending me 2FA codes to my devices, and my attempt at recovery failed. So, I guess no more access to my Google account?
Thanks @cleverdevil for your “On This Day” extension for micro.blog.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read this because it seems one of those books that should be read before one dies. So it goes. The worldview (universe view?) of the Tralfamadorian’s resonated with the reading I have done recently on stoicism. Perhaps that was always as it was meant to be?
I am glad to have read this book. but will have to contemplate more on what it means for me, who is currently living in an existence in a different era.
View all my reviews